Michael Cooper’s Hall of Fame case

Just by taking a quick glance at the numbers, it would appear that Michael Cooper is not a Hall of Famer. He averaged single digits during his NBA career and never made an All-Star team.

Taking a deeper dive into his basketball career shows that the accolades and accomplishments are compelling. He was selected to eight consecutive NBA All-Defensive teams, once winning Defensive Player of the Year, and won five NBA championship rings with the Lakers in the 1980s.

Cooper played alongside two of the greatest players of all time: Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. So offense was not high on Cooper’s priority list. He was a 3-and-D player before it was cool in an era that did not emphasize shooting from a distance.

Larry Bird, the biggest rival of the Showtime Lakers, calls Cooper the greatest player who ever guarded him. Cooper flourished in taking on the role of defensive stopper, and defense happens to be half of the game of basketball. Los Angeles is not as dominant as they were without his defensive prowess.

The Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame takes everything a player did for the sport into consideration, and Cooper was also a winner after his playing days. He won back-to-back WNBA championships in 2001 and 2002 as head coach of the Los Angeles Sparks and also coached his way to a D-League championship in 2006. He is a winner in every sense of the word.

Offense tends to be the main factor when looking back on players’ careers and determining how impactful they were to the game, but it often does not tell the whole story. Defense wins championships, and players like Michael Cooper are the perfect example of why that side of the ball is equally important to winning.

If Draymond Green makes it into the Hall of Fame once his playing days are over, so should Cooper. Green averages fewer points than Cooper for his career and has one fewer All-Defensive first-team selection and has four championships to Cooper’s five.

It feels like Green is a sure-fire Hall of Famer. It is hard to argue, though, that Cooper is not just as credible for the Hall as the Warrior’s power forward.

With players like Vlade Divac in the Hall of Fame, Cooper’s path makes that much more sense. Divac never won an NBA championship, never made an All-NBA team, and was selected to one All-Star team in 2001 while only averaging 12 points and 8.3 rebounds that season. Cooper had a much more significant impact on the game than a number of players that have already been inducted.

Time will tell if he ultimately gets into the Hall of Fame, but career statistics will not be the reason he makes it if he does one day have his name enshrined.

Top Image Caption: “Showtime” Los Angeles Lakers star Michael Cooper is photographed during the grand opening of the Ramona Gardens basketball court in Los Angeles, Wednesday, May 19, 2021. California is keeping its rules for wearing face masks in place until the state more broadly lifts its pandemic restrictions on June 15. (Ringo Chiu via AP)


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